Status Updates From The Cambridge Companion to ...

The Wealth of Nations is a great book – the greatest book ever written about economic life.
~ Amartya Sen

Even if someone finds poverty but not inequality offensive, he or she still may have to take an interest in economic inequality as a determinant of poverty.

A guy after my own heart. I hate roads (and cars) with a vengeance too :)

Smith was very attached to roads in a figurative sense, as we have seen; he was much less well disposed toward real, existing roads. He indeed imagines a violent reform to “save the ground taken up by highways,” without “interrupting the communication.”

While uniformly sceptical of the pretentions of individuals, in particular the powerful, he is convinced that their shortcomings often are a consequence of the circumstances in which they live.

Even the officers of the East India Company are not individually odious: “it is the system of government, the situation in which they are placed, that I mean to censure; not the character of those who have acted in it.”

“The liberal reward of labour” is for Smith the characteristic condition of commercial and civilized societies. “To complain of it is to lament over the necessary effect and cause of the greatest publick prosperity,” he says, and it is “abundantly plain” that an “improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people” is of advantage “to the society.” Such an improvement was a matter of justice.

“I have begun to write a book in order to pass away the time,” Smith wrote to David Hume from Toulouse, in 1764. He devoted some 12 years of his life to the composition of The Wealth of Nations, which was eventually published in 1776 (“finish your Work before Autumn; go to London; print it,” Hume had written sternly in 1772).

Police, the word, has been borrowed by the English immediately from the French, tho it is originally derived from the Greek politeia, signifying policy, politicks, or the regulation of a government in generall. It is now however generally confind to the regulation of the inferior parts of it. (LJ[A], vi.1)

Edward Gibbon, who knew Smith and his work well and looked on him with respect and affection, placed him in an exalted position: in the triumvirate of British historians: Hume, Robertson and Adam Smith.

(while excluding himself!)

In addition to the familiar argument that the pursuit of wealth has no intrinsic connection with happiness, Smith makes the stronger argument that we pursue riches in full knowledge that these external goods do not bring happiness. Smith emphasizes that we distinguish the condition of the rich, but not because we imagine that they are happier, but rather that they have more means to happiness.

Smith’s account of history and human action is contingent enough to match my sensibilities. I am a fan by now.

Thus, “the greater part of the regulations concerning the colony trade” had been designed by the merchants conducting that trade, whose “interest” thereby had “been more considered than either that of the colonies or that of the mother country” (WN, IV.vii.b.49).

“To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers,” Smith ironically noted [contd]...

Government historically emerged and developed with the growing inequality of property. Its chief objective then was to preserve justice by securing the rights of property: it was “instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all” (WN, V.i.).
All good things happened by separating justice from govt. What is the logical end of this process??

the five conventional foundations of property rights: occupation, accession, prescription, succession and tradition.

can anyone explain how this works?

… the effort to understand and elucidate the various circumstances that so prevented positive law from fully achieving the dictates of “natural justice”: Here Smith noted such forces as the corrupting influences of “the interest of the government,” “the interest of particular orders of men who tyrannize the government,” or “the rudeness and barbarism of the people”.

Mere justice is, upon most occasions, but a negative virtue, and only hinders us from hurting our neighbour. The man who barely abstains from violating either the person, or the estate of his neighbours, has surely very little positive merit. He fulfils, however, all the rules of what is peculiarly called justice… We may often fulfil all the rules of justice by sitting still and doing nothing.

When he describes the best examples of benevolence, he notes “affection,” “affectionate reverence,” and “fatherly fondness”.

Smith resembles (and perhaps influenced) Kant in his pessimistic view of our propensity to self-deception, the unreliability of our unaided passions as guides to conduct, and in his resultant stress on duty.

One of the reasons I love arguments here on Goodreads:

https://www.facebook.com/Wandering.Mi...

Each nation ought, not only to endeavour itself to excel, but to promote the excellence of its neighbours in happiness and prosperity.

Where we observe disagreement, we are motivated to see whether the disagreement can be smoothed out. It is as if by our nature we find it disagreeable to disagree.

In a period of about half a century from 1660, Aristotle was replaced with Descartes who was in turn superseded by Newton.

An admirable thing about Smith is that he does not divorce scientific “progress” from moral significance.

All machines are generally, when first invented, extremely complex in their principles, and there is often a particular principle of motion for every particular movement which it is intended they should perform. Succeeding improvers observe, that one principle may be so applied as to produce several of those movements; and thus the machine becomes gradually more and more simple.

The main underlying question is whether language mirrors the mind only because it serves to convey to others one’s language- independent mental contents or because it also somehow participates in the mental operations involved in the formation of such contents.